What does “appeasement” mean? To placate someone, to give in to their demands, in order to preserve peace. Appeasement isn’t a bad thing in human relations. We constantly appease each other in smaller or larger ways, so that life, and relationships, can go on.
But “appeasement” as a political policy was forever tarnished at Munich, Germany, in 1938, when the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, essentially gave the German dictator, Adolf Hitler, everything he wanted with regard to dismembering Czechoslovakia. “I am a man of peace to my bones,” Chamberlain said, arguing that to yield to Hitler, in this small matter of “a faraway country…of whom we know nothing,” was the way to achieve “peace for our time.”
History proved Chamberlain disastrously wrong. By giving in to Hitler, Chamberlain achieved, not peace, but the most destructive event in human history: World War II, and the destruction of the British Empire.
What is the similarity between the situation in 1938, and what we see in Oakland now? We have a City Council, or at least a majority of it, that has placated and appeased the “woke” crowd—unelected, and in the minority—who wish to defund the Oakland Police Department, if not actually to abolish it. What is fascist about them is their intolerance of viewpoints other than their own, their rigid ideology which places “social justice” over public safety, and the violence with which they rage against their perceived “enemies.” There also is something vaguely racist about some of them, like Carroll Fife, whose paranoid tirades against white males should disqualify her from public office.
While these defunders loot the Oakland Police Department to finance their schemes, the other side—the criminals on a rampage, as Hitler was in 1938—arm themselves, as Hitler did during that penultimate year before the outbreak of war. Growing ever stronger in weapons, in boldness and violence, lunatic gang members and societal misfits expand their terror over increasing swaths of Oakland. Meanwhile, the defunders claim that they have found “peace for our time” by channeling OPD money into unidentified, untransparent, unproven, unaccountable and dubious “violence prevention programs,” including the MACRO project, whose outcome no one can predict.
I am convinced History will condemn the defunders just as History has denounced Hitler and his Nazis. But what will be Oakland’s version of World War II? Hundreds of dead bodies, mainly Black; thousands of wrecked lives, the continuing destruction of downtown, the invasion of the Hills, the deterioration of the entire Town, the sense of unease which Asians, the elderly and other innocents feel in the streets, and, by the way, the worsening degradations brought by homeless encampments.